Network systems such as the Internet provide users with access to large amounts of information. In order to allow network users to find and organize information on network systems that is relevant to specific subject matter topics, various techniques have been developed. One such technique involves the use of “tags” and network-based tag services.
A tag may be a word or group of words that may be assigned to one or more items (e.g., files, documents, web pages on the Internet, items displayed via a web-based retail store, digital photographs displayed via a network, bookmarks, etc.). Tags may be used by users of a network system to, among other things, classify items, for example, by tagging a group of photographs with the tag “snow,” and search for items, for example, by searching for photographs related to winter, using a tag-based search, and entering the tag “winter.” Often, a single tag may be assigned to multiple items, and a single item may be associated with multiple tags.
A tag service may be used in a variety of environments (e.g., as a part of a web-based retail operation providing shoppers with the ability to tag specific items). The items being tagged may be provided by the network system, or by users of the network system, or by another entity. Typically, the tags to be assigned to the item or items are chosen by users of the network system.
Upon tagging an item, certain information may be made available to other users of the tag service (e.g., users may have access to items tagged by other users with a given tag). This may be a particularly useful feature when, for example, conducting web-based searches because tag-based searches generally generate results already deemed somehow relevant (i.e., “tagged”) by other users.
While tagging may be useful for classification and searches, tagging has some disadvantages. Because tag services depend on users to assign tags to items, there exists the potential that users may use tags that are meaningful only to the specific user (e.g., a person's nickname), and are not particularly useful or meaningful to users in general for purposes of tag-based searching, categorization, etc. In addition, there is typically no information about the meaning or semantics of a tag. For example, the tag “apple” may refer to a fruit, a person, or a computer. As a result, many unhelpful tags may be presented to users.
It would therefore be desirable to have a system that displays higher quality or more useful tags more prominently or more frequently than other tags to users. Other features and advantages will be made apparent from the present specification. The teachings disclosed extend to those embodiments that fall within the scope of the appended claims, regardless of whether they satisfy one or more of the above-identified needs.